Friday, June 26, 2015

Bobby Jindal Announces His Presidential Candidacy. (crickets)

Wow. I mean, wow. John Stewart, among many others, has been
skewering Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindals’ presidential announcement ad, so I
new I needed to see it for myself. I just watched it, and…wow.

Shot from the perspective of a Go Pro wearing cat caught in
a tree, the video is a one long take of Jindal and his family sitting around a
table in their backyard. Bobby, his face obscured by a tree limb, announces TO
HIS CHILDREN that he’s going to run for President.The kids respond with the same enthusiasm you
might expect from a “Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce” announcement, which
is pretty much total silence.

From the man who once said the Republican Party should stop
being the “stupid” party, this is one of the dumbest stunts I’ve ever seen from
a politician in any party.It’s wrong on
so many levels you’d need a calculator to count them all.

It’s clear that this was an attempt by handlers to make
Jindal look “folksy” and “genuine” within a casual family gathering. Got it.
And that is the first problem with this video. Casual family gatherings are
normally where people talk about very mundane, day-to-day activities, like what
happened at school or work or who’s dating whom. How many family gatherings
have you been to where someone announces he is running for President of the
United States? That would be zero.Okay,
Jindal makes one, which is what makes this concept so preposterous and
contrived.

Now, if you were taping a Presidential announcement vid, and
the premise is that you are making the announcement first to your family,
wouldn’t you want the children to be excited that Daddy might one day be
President of the U.S.? In Jindal’s video, however, the kids sit in stunned
silence, with one of the boy’s giving his Dad an awkward thumbs up.Now you or I or anyone with an IQ over 70
would say, “Hey, let’s try that again with a little more enthusiasm.” But the
geniuses in the Jindal camp must have thought the genuineness of the moment was
a positive thing. How very, very wrong they were.

And what are we to make of Jindal announcing his
presidential ambitions to children, and using that as his announcement to the
nation at large? Is he comparing the American voters to children? Does he think
he needs to make his announcement simple enough for a seven-year old to
understand?

I could go on, but I’ll end with a technical issue, but a
rather large one in my opinion. I don’t know how much the media buy was for
Bobby’s announcement, but would you or anyone else spend tens of thousands of
dollars placing a video promoting your candidate in prime time where his face
is obscured by a tree limb?Genuine
moment or not, this is a major no no. It comes off as totally amateurish rather
than a warm family moment. Do you think the American people are so familiar
with Jindal that he doesn’t need to show his face? Bobby Jindal?

Jindal’s announcement ad deserves all of the ridicule it is
getting. It’s mawkish, amateurish and displays an epic amount of poor judgment
on the part of the candidate and his team. And, I’m sure, accurately reflects
Bobby Jindal’s character to a T.